Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers

Anne Lamott is known for her perceptive and funny writings about spirituality. Listeners of all ages have followed her faith journey through decades of trial and error (sometimes more error than Annie wanted), and in her new book, she has coalesced all she knows about prayer to three essentials: Help, Thanks, and Wow. It is these three prayers - asking for assistance from a higher power, appreciating all that we have and all that is good, and feeling awe at the beauty of the world around us - that can get us through the day and can show us the way forward.

Blue Shoe

Mattie Ryder is a marvelously funny, well-intentioned, religious, sarcastic, tender, angry, and broke recently divorced mother of two young children. Then she finds a small rubber blue shoe - the kind you might get from a gumball machine - and a few other trifles that were left years ago in her father's car. They seem to hold the secrets to her messy upbringing.

Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

Anne Lamott writes about faith, family, and community in essays that are both wise and irreverent. It's an approach that has become her trademark. Now in Small Victories, Lamott offers a new message of hope that celebrates the triumph of light over the darkness in our lives. Our victories over hardship and pain may seem small, she writes, but they change us - our perceptions, our perspectives, and our lives.

Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair

From the best-selling author of Help, Thanks, Wow comes an honest, funny book about how to make sense of life's chaos. What do we do when life lurches out of balance? How can we reconnect to one other and to what's truly important when evil and catastrophe seem inescapable? These questions lie at the heart of Stitches, Anne Lamott's captivating follow-up to her New York Times best-selling Help, Thanks, Wow. In this book, Lamott explores how and where we find meaning in our modern, frantic age.

Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son's First Son

Stunned to learn that her son, Sam, is about to become a father at 19, Lamott begins a journal about the first year of her grandson, Jax's, life. In careful and often hilarious detail, Lamott and Sam - about whom she first wrote so movingly in Operating Instructions - struggle to balance their changing roles with the demands of college and work, as they both forge new relationships with Jax's mother, who has her own ideas about how to raise a child.

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

A New York Times best-selling author of both fiction and nonfiction, Anne Lamott was also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. As much a guide to writing as an exploration of the emotional challenges of being a writer, Bird by Bird offers a candid and often humorous look at how to tackle these varied obstacles.

Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith

In Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith, Lamott examines the ways we're caught in life's most daunting predicaments: love, mothering, work, politics, and maybe toughest of all, evolving from who we are to who we were meant to be. This is a complicated process for most of us, and Lamott turns her wit and honesty inward to describe her own intimate, bumpy, and unconventional road to grace and faith.

Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

With the trademark wisdom, humor, and honesty that made Anne Lamott's book on faith, Traveling Mercies, a runaway best seller, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith is a spiritual antidote to anxiety and despair in increasingly fraught times.

Imperfect Birds

Rosie Ferguson is 17 and ready to enjoy the summer before her senior year of high school. She's intelligent (she aced AP physics), athletic (a former state-ranked tennis doubles champion), and beautiful. She is, in short, everything her mother, Elizabeth, hoped she could be. But as the school year draws to a close, there are disturbing signs that the life Rosie claims to be leading is a sham.

The Opposite of Everyone: A Novel

A fiercely independent divorce lawyer learns the power of family and connection when she receives a cryptic message from her estranged mother in this bittersweet, witty novel from the nationally best-selling author of Someone Else's Love Story and Gods in Alabama - an emotionally resonant tale about the endurance of love and the power of stories to shape and transform our lives.

Publisher's Summary

Jessie's Cafe is a staging place for a group of amusing, entertaining, sometimes raucous but always very real people. Each character is wildly unique yet their human yearnings and shortcomings unite them in a common, and uncommonly strong, bond. This unlikely family includes Jessie, the gorgeous, 79 year-old who owns the waterfront dive in which "one might expect to find Steinbeck." Louise is the cook and the dymanic center of this small universe. Willie is Jessie's gay grandson. And Joe Jones is the deeply devoted and continually unfaithful lover whom Louise tries hard to live without.

Lamott weaves a complex tale that moves along breezily with great heart and humor, but skim the surface and you will find human frailty, remorse, and loss. Back in print after fifteen years, Joe Jones is a testament to the ways in which humor heals and binds.

What the Critics Say

"Anne Lamott is a cause for celebration. [Her] real genius lies in capturing the ineffable, describing not perfect moments, but imperfect ones...perfectly. She is nothing short of miraculous." (The New Yorker) "Funny and candid....Lamott brings invaluable humor, imagination, and magnanimity to the conversation about faith." (Booklist)

Anne Lamont develops a group of unlikely characters, all connected by Jessie's Cafe. You laugh with them, cry with them, and get angry at their foibles. Their individual idiosyncrasies give richness to each character.

Barbara Rosenblat (my favorite narrator) uses her many voices to ceate each personality. Soon, you can identify each character by their distinctive voice. Definintely worth the credit!

I have enjoyed several of Anne Lamott???s books, including her more recent work, Imperfect Birds. Her characters have many unique, even eccentric personality traits, habits, strengths, and weaknesses, but each is very human and understandable. The many odd characters in Joe Jones, including Joe, himself, are funny and insignificant but worth understanding. Both the author and the narrator understand each of the characters and convey that understanding very well. Maybe we should just pretend that the main characters are significant, as if we also believe in HP -- the Higher Power.
By the way, I cannot understand why two reviewers find fault with the narrator. She has the tone of the book ???dead on???, in my opinion.

i love anne lamott and once drove twenty miles trying to find a bookstore with anything she had written in it while on vacation. i was very excited to hear this selection, but i cannot stand the narrator. her voice takes up so much room that i cannot concentrate on the story. lamott has enough voice just on paper that whatever rosenblat adds is far too much. i wish lamott had read it herself

Here's the problem: you've got to love the reader Barbara Rosenblatt to enjoy this recording at all. I have a feeling the book is better than it sounds, but with Ms. Rosenblatt doing what amount to "funny voices" that are by turns implausible, self-conscious, and coy, you can't begin to tell what Anne LaMott's original intent was. I say read this as a book so that you can make up your own mind.